Versatility lands the deal for Allen & Heath dLive at three-campus church

A church with three different-sized campuses has found the dLive Digital Mixing System from Allen & Heath to be a versatile, scalable solution – and volunteer operators can now switch between locations and find a familiar control surface.

Silverdale Baptist Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, recently acquired a dLive for its church campus in Ooltewah. A second dLive, in the Creekside campus, will be installed at front of house soon, and the church is planning for a third dLive to be installed in its main Bonny Oaks campus.

After considering several digital mixers, Matt Johnson, Silverdale’s technical director, and Mark Randolph, the church’s media minister, chose the dLive following an on-site demo at Bonny Oaks. “The more we listened to it and played with it, the more we loved it,” said Johnson. He added, “All Silverdale campuses have a band on the stage and the Bonny Oaks campus typically has a 30-40 person choir. But our congregation is diverse. So we meet in the middle between traditional and contemporary styles. The dLive fit our worship needs and could be scaled to each of our campuses while meeting our budget.”

The dLive was a significant upgrade from the older digital mixers from various brands that the volunteer tech crew at Ooltewah had been using, explained Johnson: “We’ve got a rock-solid crew and the guys were willing to dive in. The simplicity of dLive’s set-up kind of threw us for a loop – it is as easy as dragging and dropping!”

“We’re trying to unify what we do, console-wise,” Johnson continued. “That way, a volunteer from another campus can walk up to the console and find things generally in the same locations. So it’s fantastic that the dLive makes it easy to assign inputs to layers in each bank.”

Johnson notes the Ooltewah volunteers are using the dLive’s internal effects with no outside processing. “When you see the dLive’s latency at less than one millisecond, that’s impressive,” he said.

Silverdale purchased its dLives from Solid Rock Live in Chattanooga. The Ooltewah dLive consists of a C Class C3500 Surface, a CDM48 MixRack and a DX168 Expander. The Creekside dLive consists of a C3500 and CDM48. A third dLive will be configured for the Bonny Oaks campus.

Johnson commented: “Allen & Heath has given us a console that I can scale from a 200-seat venue all the way up to a 2000-seat venue and operate the same across all variations while being cost-effective. It really has impressed us with its speed and versatility.”